Many LaTeX documents, one BibTeX database

As a researcher, I spend most of my time writing LaTeX, using many tools, among which BibTeX, the bibliography database processor. Our team manages a huge .bib file centralizing all publications we read and might need to cite someday.

Since nearly everything we write uses that file, it gets linked or copied into each the source directory of each new document. Some of us even have a bash alias to automate that copy, but they still have to invoke it for each new paper. But…

Zero cost solution:

Just put the database somewhere in BibTeX’s search path!

Duh… Seems obvious, but somehow it took me 10 years of regular LaTeX usage to think of it… Anyway, to see where BibTeX will look, run this¹:

kpsepath bib

This should display a $PATH-like colon-separated list of directory names². With a standard TeXlive installation, there should be:

• . for BibTeX files that are besides their LaTeX document,
• then a couple ones starting in ~/.texliveYYYY which are for caching automatically generated files,
• then the per-user additions directory we want,
• and finally some standard distribution-wide places.

By default, the per-user directory is ~/Library/texmf on Mac and ~/texmf on Linux; this is where you would install third-party packages, by the way.

In our case, the ///bibtex/bib// suffix means that BibTeX will look for files anywhere under a bibtex/bib directory, itself at any depth under texmf. So we just need to create ~/Library/texmf/bibtex/bib, symlink our foo.bib files in there.

We can check that all is good:

$ kpsewhich lse.bib
/Users/someone/Library/texmf/bibtex/bib/foo.bib

It finds the newly installed foo.bib, so voilà, \bibliography{foo} now works in any document without further preparation!